I figured I might open this first entry with the reasons why, in the year 2025, I've set up a personal website and blog and done it in what many might consider 'the hard way' (it's not that hard, my friend--how many of us did this on geocities when we were pre-teens? tweaked our myspace page layouts? you can do this too if you want to).

My primary motivation when I started tinkering with neocities a little over a year ago was that I hope to finally get some short stories published and it seemed like a good idea to have some sort of author website in place if/when that happens. A very close and unsurprising second to that (and what has driven me back to actually getting a real website set up) is just how frustrating and limited yet overwhelming the world wide web has become, the political climate, censorship of marginalized voices, etc. etc. Very few of the people who regularly use the internet now have any real control over their online presences. They have a facebook or an instagram or a twitter account and are beholden to the whims of the technogarch billionaires controlling them and we're seeing how that's going. Even BlueSky has been woefully falling short of what it was in the very recent past (though I have some hope that the parallel services being set up using AT Protocol will help eventually).

The skinner box algorithms of social media and the apathy those platforms have shown toward basic human dignity drove me off most of the big ones long ago. The glut of generative "AI" slop only makes them even less appealing. That said, I do still spend time in online communities. A select few discord servers and an ancient web forum that's still kicking. I have a Bluesky account (at least until I can migrate it do a different PDS and AppView). There are still plenty of ways to curate one's experience of the internet and I'm trying my best to do that. "Be Your Own Algorithm" is a refrain I've encountered a few times now and I think there's merit to it. Especially in a time when a despressing amount of people seem content to have a sycophantic chatbot lie to them instead of approaching the world with a healthy mix of skepticism and curiosity.

I am trying to stich a quilt from the few scraps of optimism I have left though. I think a lot of us are now realizing the value of decentralized platforms (whether it's social media or news and journalism) and how important it is to have control over your own work and your experiences rather than passively waiting to see whatever gushes out of the engagement firehose. Blogs are still around, if not seeing a small renaissance in the various popular 'newsletter' style platforms. We probably won't get back to the same sort of heyday they had in roughly the late 00s to mid 10s, but it doesn't meant we shouldn't try.

I also believe there's still plenty about the web that can be useful, enriching, and fun. We just need to put in a little more effort to track down personal websites, read some blogs, connect with real people, and eschew the mid-ness of instant gratifcation.

To contribute a little to organic discovery, a few interesting articles I've read recently are this Reactor article by Gwen C. Katz about gender identity in C.J. Cheryh's Chanur series (of which I've only read the first so far but absolutely plan to read more eventually), and this article by Sascha Stronach published in Strange Horizons about the stark cultural difference between the US and other anglophones (specifically Kiwis). This one is eye-opening and absolutely has changed my approach to reading works by authors from Aotearoa (New Zealand). I'm sure I'll have plenty more to share here in the future. Reactor and Strange Horizons are relatively big names in the speculative fiction world, but there are plenty of essays, articles, short stories, and indie publishers I've been coming across lately and I look forward to sharing them here.

That's all for now, and I hope you have a good one.

-Verdigristle 9.20.25